


The Problem With Prophecy

by mountain_born



Series: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin [28]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Doctor Who/Avenger Crossover Fusion, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-06
Updated: 2015-06-06
Packaged: 2018-04-03 02:10:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,922
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4082680
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_born/pseuds/mountain_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which River, Clint, and Coulson regroup after their impromptu visit to the Tree House, and discuss a little problem with prophecy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Problem With Prophecy

**Author's Note:**

> Never-ending thanks and kudos and chocolate to my wonderful beta, **like-a-raven**. I can't wait to see what sort of plots we cook up this weekend!
> 
> This story takes place right on the heels of _Hidden in Plain Sight_ and _The Initiative_. I tried incorporating it into one of the other fics, but River, Clint, and Coulson rather demanded their own small space to deal with their little prophecy problem. (They're incredibly bossy like that.)
> 
> Enjoy!

_July 4, 2011_

River had something preying on her mind.

Clint glanced over at the copilot’s seat. They were a little over two hours into their flight from the Tree House back to New York, and River had been silent since the pre-flight checks. That in and of itself wasn’t necessarily a cause for concern. River was a quiet person by nature. She wasn’t stressed or angry or upset (he would know). There was nothing specific that Clint could point to that told him that River’s brain was spinning at a million miles an hour as she stared out at the horizon. It was just an undercurrent, a sort of humming in the air. 

It was an undercurrent that Clint was very attuned to. He’d had a lot of exposure to it during River’s first couple of years with SHIELD, when she’d been keeping secrets piled on top of secrets. He was at a loss as to what had brought it on now, though. Whatever she was mulling over must have come up in the middle of the night. Everything had been normal (for their definition of the word “normal”) when Clint had fallen asleep in the Tree House’s medical bay last evening.

It was time to crack the silence.

“God, it’ll be good to get home,” Clint said, adjusting a control that didn’t really need adjusting. “Nice of Fury to already approve some time off for us. Any ideas about what you’d like to do?”

Clint looked over at River. _Anything you want to talk about?_

River half-smiled. Clint knew that she had heard his underlying question. “I definitely think we should get off base,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I could do with a few completely work-free days.”

 _Yes there is, but I don’t want to talk about it at SHIELD._ Clint raised a questioning eyebrow, but River glanced pointedly around at the cockpit and just shook her head slightly. 

Okay, apparently that included the jet. 

Clint looked over his shoulder to check on Coulson, only to find that their handler had dozed off in his seat again. Coulson had been given a 99% clean bill of health this morning, but he was still wiped out from the effects of the toxin he’d been exposed to yesterday. Clint could hear faint snoring over the engine noise.

“Do you think we should hang out with Phil or just let him hole up in his apartment and rest?” Clint asked.

_Just you and me, or is this something for all three of us?_

“He’ll probably need a bit of looking after, don’t you think?” River looked back at Coulson as well. “At least for the first night. Otherwise you know he’s just going to order Chinese food and work on reports.”

Clint nodded. All three of them it was, then.

*****

Fury had promised Strike Team Delta some R&R time, but there were a couple of hoops they had to jump through first. Dr. Levine was waiting in the hanger when they landed in New York. She all but pounced on Coulson the moment he set foot off the jet.

“I’m fine. Really,” Coulson tried to protest.

All he really wanted was to somehow magically transport to Brooklyn, see if his apartment had died of neglect in his absence, and lay down.

Levine looked supremely unimpressed. “Uh huh. Go get your medical degree and then we’ll talk,” she said. “You’re coming down for an exam. The less you stall, argue, and grumble, the sooner you’ll be out of here.”

Coulson supposed he couldn’t blame Levine for wanting to be careful. The toxin he’d been exposed to had been experimental and nasty stuff. He probably could have pushed back enough to forego the exam, but he got outvoted. Clint and River sided with Levine.

Traitors.

After Levine had given Coulson the all clear, they had to meet with Fury for a debriefing.

Fury’s attention was focused on the view screen when they filed into his office. Coulson had enough time to see a map—he was pretty sure he recognized the coast of Greenland—before Fury switched out of it. 

Mission-wise, there really wasn’t much to go over. Fury had already gotten the highlights of their salvage mission, and he’d been on comms with them through Coulson’s highly unpleasant bout of poisoning. That left the matter of the Tree House, Fury’s top secret auxiliary command center. The talk was pretty much standard fare: _Highly confidential. Strictly need to know. This information goes no further._

All in all, the debriefing lasted a grand total of fifteen minutes before the Director dismissed them. Fury had gone back to his view screen before they were even all the way out of the door. Coulson saw what looked like a live feed of people tromping around on an ice sheet before the door closed.

“Short and sweet. That’s the way I like them,” Clint said as they headed for the elevators.

“I already sent a text to the motor pool,” River said. “I just requested one car. We’ll take you home. You’re not up for driving just yet,” she added with a glance at Coulson.

He couldn’t help but smile with slight amusement at the unconsciously stern note in River’s voice. Every so often a little thing like that would crop up to remind Coulson that River was actually _older_ than he was.

“You two are planning to babysit me tonight, aren’t you?” Coulson said as they stepped onto the elevator.

His agents looked thoroughly and completely unapologetic.

“That’s the general plan, yeah,” Clint said.

Coulson just nodded. _Acceptance: The final stage in acknowledging that being a mother hen will come back to bite you in the ass._

“So long as we can stop and grab something for dinner on the way,” Coulson said. He looked down at River, who was standing between him and Clint, and added mildly, “And so long as, when we get there, you tell us why you’ve been acting so damn cagey all day.”

Coulson had picked up on River’s mood before they’d left the Tree House; Clint had probably caught it before he and River had exchanged more than three words that morning.

River just glanced up at him with her trademark wry, crooked smile.

“Believe me,” she said, “that’s a promise.”

*****

“Ho. Lee. Shit,” Clint said.

“That’s. . .” Even Coulson looked dumbfounded. “Yeah, I’m going to have to agree with Clint. Holy shit.”

“That largely summed up my feelings as well,” River said. 

They were gathered around Coulson’s kitchen table, looking at the piece of creased and crumpled yellow note paper that River had laid out in the middle of several cartons worth of take-out. She hadn’t quite known what to do with the paper. She hadn’t wanted to risk trying (and failing) to destroy it while they were still in the Tree House.

River had lain awake all night last night while the words that were written on that sheet of paper had chased themselves through her brain over and over. Ten words; the proper name of the Tree House, Fury’s ultra-top-secret remote command center.

_Triskelion Remote Emergency Northern Zone Auxiliary Location Offensive Response Encampment_

_T.R.E.N.Z.A.L.O.R.E._

As soon as River had put the acronym together, she’d wanted to wake up Clint and Coulson and show them, but common sense had quickly overridden gut instinct. It was a very good bet that the Tree House was under surveillance from the inside out, just given its sensitive nature. She didn’t want the wrong people to know that she’d seen what had been hidden in plain sight.

Exactly who those wrong people might _be_ River didn’t know, but you didn’t live as long as she had doing what she did without cultivating a healthy degree of paranoia.

So, instead she had turned out her light and pretended to sleep. In the morning she’d gotten up and pretended that everything was normal, though Clint had seen right through her, of course. 

She’d wanted to wait until it was as safe as possible before she told her friends what she’d found.

“I don’t get it,” Clint said. “Trenzalore is on Earth? Not just on Earth, but a part of SHIELD?”

“So it would seem,” River said. 

For River’s part, she had had her quiet freak out last night. Now? Well, now she wouldn’t exactly call herself copasetic, but she seemed to have settled into a state of quiet bemusement on the subject.

“River.” Coulson looked to be at a complete loss (not an expression often seen on the man’s face). “What does this _mean?”_

“I have absolutely no idea,” River said, reaching for her beer.

“The name has to be deliberate though, right?” Clint said. “I mean, _TRENZALORE?_ No one just pulls that out of their ass.”

“Maybe?” River said. She shrugged helplessly. “That’s the problem with prophecy. It’s all _chicken-and-egg._ What came first? Did someone—and by _someone_ I suppose I mean Fury—build a base named Trenzalore because of the prophecy? Or does the prophecy call Trenzalore by name because the base exists? There’s no real way to know.”

“How did the prophecy go again?” Coulson asked. “The exact wording?”

 _“On the fields of Trenzalore at the fall of the Eleventh, when no living creature can speak falsely or fail to answer, a Question will be asked. A Question that must never, ever be answered,”_ River recited. “That was as much as the Academy ever knew. There was no common consensus on what Trenzalore was. Uncle Robert was convinced that it was a planet. Aunt Elizabeth thought it was more likely to be a city, a place that a battlefield was named for.”

“But it’s the place where the Doctor is supposed to die,” Clint said.

“It’s the place where the Silence was determined he must _never_ die,” River said. “If the Doctor were to die at Trenzalore, it would mean that the Silence would fall. That’s if you believe in prophecy, of course, which the Silence did and, I presume, still does. That was why they took me. My job was supposed to be to kill the Doctor before he could ever reach Trenzalore. Eliminate their biggest enemy and the potential cause of their downfall all in one fell swoop.”

River had rather put a cramp in that plan the day she’d decided that she no longer wanted to play the Academy’s game, the day she’d run away. That day in Queens, Melody Pond _had_ killed the Doctor. River Song had saved him, giving up her own ability to regenerate in order to bring him back.

The Doctor would die for good someday, no doubt. Every living thing eventually did. But his death wouldn’t be by her hand.

“What do you want to do with this, River?” Coulson asked.

River blew out a long breath. She’d been turning that very question over in her mind all day.

“Sit on it,” she said. She looked from Coulson to Clint. “I think that’s all we can do. I don’t know what this means, if it means anything at all. And if we dig into Trenzalore, I’m afraid it will just attract attention that we don’t want.”

Sometimes the only course of action was to watch and wait.

And make sure the Doctor never stumbled onto the Tree House. 

 

***Tune in next time for _The Man Out of Time,_ as another member of the Avengers makes his debut in the _Marvelous Tale_ 'verse!


End file.
